Being Alexander Read online

  table of contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  About the Author

  Copyright

  to john,

  for always believing in me

  acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Eugenie Furniss, Wayne Brookes, Tracy Fisher, Allison Dickens, Anika Streitfeld, Alicia Gordon, Lucinda Prain, and to all those who have shown such support and enthusiasm for this book.

  Thanks to Linda and Chuck Scribner, Mark Sparling, Jennifer Huizenga, Brenda Beckett, Jennifer Egbert, Courtney Colpan, and Rebecca Sparling for their encouragement. And thanks to Angela Fisher for the years of laughter.

  clarity

  Life is not about love. It’s not about friendship. It’s certainly not about honor or virtue or living up to some imaginary morality. It’s not about kindness or caring or giving. Or even sex. It’s about success. And, above all, it’s about money.

  Ah, fame and fortune, you say, but you don’t understand, that’s not it, that’s not it at all. A splash of good old fame is fine, but it’s not enough; fame comes and goes and the public is notoriously fickle, loving one moment, destructive the next. It’s fortune that matters, solid material wealth. Enough of it to withstand whatever life throws your way. Success and power to survive the attacks by the enemies you’ve undoubtedly made on your way up.

  And I want it. I want it all.

  My name is Alexander Fairfax and I’m twenty-nine years old.

  Yesterday I was Alex, but today I am Alexander. I have been born anew. Today is the first day of my life. Not of the rest of my life. Of my life.

  all the yesterdays

  (before the haze was lifted)

  I would have been content to carry on as I’d carried on before, and the days and weeks would have turned into months and years and I would have turned into a drone. Get on the train, go to work, spend money, buy a flat, buy a house, get into debt, buy designer clothes, eat at fancy restaurants, go on expensive holidays, work harder, work harder, earn that bonus, spend that money, owe money, owe money, owe money.

  then

  At the instant of death, the defining moments in life are supposed to flash through your mind like a series of golden holiday snaps, with you, the victorious, all-conquering hero, at the center. Yet what would I, the old I, the Alex of yesterday, have seen?

  A gray-hued, gut-wrenchingly bland life. A glorious waste of my allotted fourscore and ten years.

  Sedate, calm, a good sport, a good winner, a good loser, an all-round likeable bloke. I was kind to strangers and considerate: I always gave up my seat on the Tube to the elderly, the pregnant, the infirm. I was nice. But what, exactly, is “nice”? It’s a boring word to describe boring people who have no memorable qualities. Interesting people can be kind and considerate, but I bet you fifty pounds you’d think of at least half a dozen other adjectives to describe someone you find intriguing before you got round to calling them “nice.”

  I was nice. Alex was nice. That’s the first word people used to describe me. But did that get me anywhere? Did it get me ahead in life? Was it good for my personal life? Was it good for my career? What do you think? Of course not. I existed. I breathed. I was a pushover who got trampled ever deeper into the slurping, sucking pit of mud at the bottom of the hill. While others pushed and shoved me aside in their struggles to emerge as King of the Mountain, I smiled and shrugged and good-naturedly stepped farther to the side to let them pass.

  But no more. No more.

  Fuck the rest of the world. They’ve already fucked me over. Now it’s my turn. And I won’t just sit here silently hoping that curses, murder, and mayhem will follow those who’ve wronged me. Oh, no, Alexander’s a proactive chap now. I have work to do. Lots of work to do.

  Maybe, instead, I should thank them for opening my eyes. It’s because of them, after all, that I’m in control now. My id, my self, me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me.

  I matter. Fuck the arseholes.

  And fuck forgiveness. Let’s see how they like the new me.

  A week ago everything was normal. I was normal. I was happy. I thought my life was pretty good. Maybe I wasn’t a movie star or a millionaire, but I was doing okay for myself. Attractive if not actually handsome, I’d hit the highest tax bracket at twenty-four. I had enough cash for designer labels, even if I hardly bought any, choosing to spend my money on my car. I had a great car. I was content. I was happy being a nobody, a loser. I was nice, placid, blissfully ignorant Alex. But looking back now I can see that it was all a lie. My life was a fucking disaster. It was, I tell you, it was.

  The transformation was tough. Painful. It was agony, but being Alexander is so much better than merely being Alex. I acknowledge that with honesty, but it doesn’t change things. Not for them. My life, Alex’s life, might have been pathetic, but it was mine. And I’ll never forget my revenge.

&nb
sp; the last week of alex

  Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong in the last seven days. I could order the incidents from best to worst or most humiliating or most surprising or even most funny for onlookers, but that would spoil it. Chronological order is the only way. Event building upon event building upon event.

  Monday morning, and I’m talking early Monday, in the wee hours of the morning you still think of as Sunday, I only say Monday because you have to get the date right for the insurance people, I was woken by a car alarm. Or, rather, by an elbow in the ribs and a voice in my ear. “Alex, are you awake?”

  Spluttering, I came to, snapped away from an all-too-vivid dream in which I was growing smaller and smaller, shrinking in size until I was slightly larger than a penny. I don’t know what would have happened if it had continued. Would I have shrunk to nothing and died not only in my dream state but also in reality? Should I have performed some sort of post-Freudian, post-Jungian psychological interpretation of this dream? Was my subconscious trying to tell me that I was nothing? Or that I was in danger of becoming nothing? Was it a warning sign? An early warning sign my complacent, comfortable, content waking self would never have recognized?

  “Alex. Alex, wake up.” Sarah’s voice, so gentle and lilting in the day, seemed harsh and screeching, unkind even, as if her lack of sleep was all my fault. As if she were blaming me.

  “What?”

  “Wake up.”

  “I am awake.”

  “Then do something,” she said.

  The car alarm, lost to me in the confusion of my pull from deep sleep, suddenly seemed to grow in volume. The more I listened to it, the louder and more strident it became.

  “Damn things,” I said, pulling my pillow over my head to dampen the noise. “Bloody nuisance. Don’t know why people bother.”

  Sarah snatched the pillow away. Slowly, as if she were explaining the concept of crayons to a dull-witted five-year-old, she said, “It’s your car alarm.”

  “Shit.”

  I leapt from the bed and raced to the window, snatching the curtains aside. Out on the road, three floors down, I could see a group of four teenagers. Male, of course. Probably no more than fourteen, with that particular aura about them so you just knew they were going to be spotty and greasy, and stringy, squeaky and unpleasant in a way that girls never are, no matter how big their glasses, how shiny their metal braces, how riddled with acne their own faces. For a second I felt sorry for them, for their ages, for what they were suffering, for what they were going to suffer in the next few years, then I saw what they were doing. Surrounding my car. Kicking my car. Breaking my windscreen. Slashing my tires.

  “Hey,” I shouted. Idiot. Of course they couldn’t hear me. I grabbed a pair of jeans from the floor and tried to pull them on as I ran to the door. Why is it that when you’re in a hurry something always goes wrong? I should have been sensible and logical and known that I couldn’t run and put on jeans at the same time. Instead, I tried to do both and wasn’t very successful at either. So, hobbling with one leg hampered by the jeans I couldn’t quite pull up, I flung open the door and ran out into the hall. Thud. The door slammed shut behind me and I quickly became aware of a few things all at once. The door was locked and I didn’t have any keys. I’d only managed to pull my jeans up to my thighs. Mrs. Roberts, the sixty-something insomniac from next door who’d taken to roaming the stairs at all hours of the night, was staring, goggle-eyed, at the first male testicles she’d seen since her husband had run off with an air stewardess the year before. And I wasn’t wearing any shoes.

  Okay, okay, I admit it. They weren’t necessarily all of the same importance, but that’s what happened. I’d like to say that I shrugged it off, zipped up my jeans and ran outside to kick the shit out of those four little punks, but this is Alex we’re talking about, not Alexander.

  I blushed beet red as Mrs. Roberts (I don’t even know her Christian name) continued to stare, and to make matters worse, as if it were aware of the scrutiny, as if it wanted to give a poor lonely old woman something to remember, my own flesh betrayed me.

  “Hello, Alex,” said Mrs. Roberts as she stared, a smile hovering around her lips.

  I yanked my jeans up, nodded and ran down the stairs as I tried to do up the zipper. I felt as if I’d betrayed Sarah. And with a woman older than my own mother. I decided not to think about it, to leave the incident unanalyzed, fearful of what conclusions I might draw.

  So, bare-chested, bare-footed, I raced down the stairs, sick at heart, sick to my stomach, certain only that I was angry. I flung open the foyer doors and went out into the street.

  They were gone. I didn’t even have the satisfaction of shouting at them or chasing them down the street. I didn’t even have the chance to get into a fight. They were gone and all that was left was my poor, battered car.

  It was defaced. It was wounded. Sacrilege. Tires slashed and deflated, front and back windscreens smashed, all but one side window gone. The clear outline of a boot print on the driver’s door. Indentations up and down the bonnet. Key scratches ruining the paintwork. The stereo—one of those where you take off the front panel so thieves can see it’s not worth breaking in to steal it—smashed in and useless. The leather seats—soft and welcoming and so inviting—slashed and hacked into pieces. Even the car alarm was broken. Ruined. Vandalized.

  A Jaguar XKR Supercharged Coupe is a work of art. Its contours are smooth and rounded, the paint shiny and fresh, the tires a perfect fit, the lights sexy and sleek. I’m one of those men who loves cars the way women love clothes and shopping, the way other men are mad about football. If it were up to me, the Tate Modern would be filled with sports cars, luxury cars, seductive, shiny points of worship. Who needs the cross-section of a sheep or a pig’s fetus in formaldehyde when you can have a Porsche? A Jaguar? A Lamborghini? That’s real modern art.

  Okay, okay, our flat’s in Finsbury Park, I should have known better. It used to be safe when I lived in Clapham and had my own garage (a wide one so I didn’t have to worry about scraping my car), but Sarah wanted to move in together, I wanted it too, and we ended up in her flat. (She insisted on living north of the river to make the journey out of London to see her family in Luton as easy as possible. Never mind that it was better for me to live south of the Thames to see mine.) I know I shouldn’t have parked it on the street, but the waiting list for a garage that’s reasonably close and wide enough inside to open the driver’s door is over two years. I wasn’t going to give up my car. I couldn’t wait that long. Anything can happen in two years. I could be dead in two years. I decided not to store it in my old garage all the way across town, as it was impractical and inconvenient. I’d thought it was worth the risk. I’d decided—maturely, logically—that I could cope if it was stolen. It was beautiful. There’s no other word to describe it. It never crossed my mind that it would be subject to this sort of mindless violence. Only a man without a soul would wantonly cause such destruction to a Jaguar XKR. Or a handful of spotty youths. Philistines.

  They didn’t even try to take it on a joyride.

  things could only get better, right? wrong

  Although it had happened in the middle of the night, by the time I’d sorted out the insurance, the police report, and been to A and E to have my feet cleaned and stitched—they had been cut by splinters from my shattered windows (I told you it was a bad week)—it was eleven A.M. before I made it in to work. I’d phoned at seven and left a message with the receptionist (why on earth do they insist Reception is covered at that time in the morning if they’re not going to bother doing anything with the messages the receptionist receives?) to say I’d be late.

  My feet swaddled in huge white bandages—you’d think that alone would have caused some decent human reaction, I mean my feet were in a terrible state—I hobbled into work in a pair of oversized slippers. A little bit of sympathy wouldn’t have gone amiss. I was annoyed at the time, but I understand it now. It’s all about self-promotion and success
. Never mind that it was Alex. Never mind that I’d done them countless favors over the years. Never mind that they were supposedly my mates. I wasn’t there to fight my own corner so that was too bad for me.

  “Sorry.” That was the first word he said to me. At the time I thought he’d received my message, heard about my car and was sympathizing. But he wasn’t looking at my feet, didn’t even seem to notice the bandages.

  That should have been my first clue that something was wrong. Maybe it was guilt. Maybe the guilt was eating him up so badly that he had to talk, to spew it out before it festered any longer.

  Jed. Jedidiah Wright. My boss. For such a big, butch, American-sounding lumberjack name he’s really just a weedy, self-satisfied, middle-class twit. Or that’s what I think now. I rather liked him once.

  “I tried to reach you,” Jed said, as I collapsed with relief into my chair.

  “I—”

  He cut me off. “I phoned and phoned, but all I got was a message saying your mobile’s unavailable.”

  “Is it?” I pulled it out and switched it on. “It’s working now,” I said. And it was. My phone was on; it was only my career that was dead.

  “Kenneth,” Jed was saying, ignoring my comments as if I hadn’t spoken, “called a last-minute meeting about the Guinness campaign. I tried to reach you.”

  Kenneth—that’s Kenneth Wilmington-Wilkes to you and me—is our managing director. He’s legendary for holding impromptu meetings, hoping to surprise unwary teams and skewer underperforming employees. He calls it “culling bad management from the firm.” We call it being a heartless bastard.

  I suppose I should have been thankful. I hadn’t lost my job. In fact, I hadn’t come to Kenneth’s notice at all. You see, he was rather taken with “our” latest campaign. “Our” meaning me, Thomas, and William led by the invincible Jed.

  Thomas and William have now been “moved” (promoted, I know the pecking order around here, next step is for them to move into supervisory positions with the resulting salaries that entails) on to the latest Cadbury’s ad (one of our bread-and-butter clients). No doubt Jed has been given a hefty bonus (not that he told me: our contracts specifically forbid discussing salaries and other such mundane issues; for fear that we lowly hard-working employees would rebel when we discovered the huge pay discrepancies in the company).